Saturday, April 04, 2009

More Nocturnes at MINSY

Earlier this month, The Nocturnes hosted another night shoot-out on the decommissioned Mare Island Naval Shipyard (MINSY). Although this is my eighth time shooting the MINSY at night, I enjoy the challenge of returning to the same place (but not too often) because it forces me to work harder to look for new things to photograph. There's also a fascinating documentary aspect to photographing Mare Island because the development engine continues moving forward, and I can easily see the changes every six months. Because of the state of the economy, most of those changes involve tearing buildings down, as opposed to putting up new buildings. And every time I see a few more buildings demolished, I wish that I had photographed them instead of shooting something that's still standing.

(Periscope Building by Andy Frazer)

One interesting aspect of military bases is the sheer scale of the structures. Naval bases also have large things such as dry docks, or cranes:

(Photo by Andy Frazer)

You can see more night photographs taken at Mare Island earlier this month by many other photographers. Just search the Flickr tag nocturnes090307.